Dar went looking for a less obvious site. He found it less than seventy yards to the northwest of the first one. This second site was also tucked against large boulders, but offered only a narrow gap between slabs of rocks, the shooting site overgrown with prickly bushes, in which a sniper and his spotter could both lie prone. The site was higher than the first and offered a slightly better view while being even harder to approach from any angle without exposure. The extra seventy yards or so of range would not be a problem for the kind of modernized Dragunov SVD sniper rifle used to kill Tom Santana and the three FBI agents.
It took Dar almost three hours to retreat from the site without leaving any footprints, hike all the way around the ridge to the steep rear approach to the boulders of the ridgeline, and free-climb the near-vertical rock wall more than a hundred feet to a point on the larger boulder above the second sniper’s nest. There he had to secure a Perlon climbing rope around a boulder in order to rappel down the steep arc of the rock face to a shrub-filled ledge where he could set up the video camera, conceal it, its battery, and its transmitter with the waterproof camouflage tarp, and then hide the long broadcast antenna by running it up cracks in the rock face to the summit.
Dar then returned to the cabin and tested the monitor. The picture was not as clear as the transmission from the other four cameras, but he could clearly see the second sniper’s nest from above and zoom in on the original site he had found lower down.
Dar spent the rest of the morning hiking the rocky ridges and steep ravines to the northeast of the two sites he had found. He was not satisfied until nearly noon.
Syd explained that the FBI’s primary concern was the Russians. They had shown their ruthlessness and their ability to kill at long range. Several FBI tactical team world-class snipers and assault experts were flown in from Quantico. At night, with no muss or fuss, eight of the surrounding houses in the Santa Anita hills above Sierra Madre Boulevard were evacuated and taken over as observation or command and control centers for Special Agent Warren’s task force.
Every movement the Russians made was followed—tail cars and lead cars changing off, helicopters at 8,000 feet watching through powerful optics—and by the time the five Russians drove their two Mercedeses back to the ranch house on Wednesday evening, the tac-team had grown to sixty-two. By this time, FBI snipers in ghillie suits had laboriously crawled to within 150 yards of the house on all sides.
The FBI shooters were armed with the most modern equipment available—modified De Lisle Mark 5 sniper rifles firing 7.62 mm rounds in either standard or subsonic combinations. The rifles were descended from Dar’s venerable Remington 700 bolt-action model, but had evolved about as far as space shuttle pilots had from the first African australopithecine hominids. The weapons utilized heavy match barrels with integral suppressors—“silencers” to the layman—which, when combined with subsonic ammunition, allowed for accuracy at ranges of more than two hundred yards. The rifles made no sound, not even the smack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier.
Mounted on each De Lisle Mark 5 was a single, lightweight, integrated sight which combined a powerful telescopic sight with an image-intensifying night sight, an infrared range finder, and a thermal imager. The FBI snipers could kill at two hundred yards in the rain on a starless night through light fog or smoke.
The rest of the FBI assault teams were outfitted with Kevlar helmets, full body armor, gas masks, infrared goggles, fully suppressed submachine guns with laser sights, .45-caliber fully automatic pistols, and stun grenades known in the trade as “flash bangs.” For the 5:00 A.M. assault on Thursday, the lead team would go in behind a barrage of tear gas projectiles fired through all the windows and use a man-carried hydraulic battering ram to take down the front door. Then the first three tac teams would enter the building by all available first-floor windows and doors. Waiting in the garage of the nearest house was a fully armored tactical assault vehicle with its own battering ram. Five helicopters were tasked to the assault, and each of them carried master marksmen. Two of the helicopters were equipped to drop men on lines for rapid assault from the air.
“Hardly seems like a fair fight,” Syd Olson suggested to Special Agent in Charge Warren on Wednesday afternoon.
Warren had given her the slightest of smiles. “If it becomes anything near a fair fight,” he said, “I deserve to be fired.”
Syd had nodded and called Dar at his condo to see how he was doing.
Dar was doing fine by Wednesday afternoon. He had used the morning to catch up on work in his warehouse apartment—documenting the fatal Gomez swoop-and-squat and preparing a computer-animated reenactment of Attorney Esposito’s death by scissors lift. He chatted with Syd a few minutes, telling her that he was going up to his cabin to get a good night’s sleep while she and her colleagues did all the hard work the next day. He asked her to be careful, promised to see her on Thursday, and wished her luck.
Dar had spent all of the previous afternoon and evening zeroing his two weapons. Using the ravine to the east of the cabin—it was sixty feet wide where the gold mine opened into it, narrowing to less than twenty feet in width up the hill parallel to where Dar had found the potential sniper roosts—he fired off several hundred rounds of ammunition from both his old M40 bolt-action and the loaner Light Fifty.
Dar used a new purchase—a $3,295 pair of new Leica Geovid BDII range-finding binoculars—to double-check the range with the Leica’s built-in laser range finder as he set out targets at distances of 100 yards, 300 yards, 650 yards, and 1,000 yards. Dar was capable of thinking in meters, but like most old-time snipers, he did range-finding calculations in yards. He was pleased that his visual estimates of target distance in each case fell within five feet of the laser’s readout. The Leica’s range finder itself was guaranteed to be accurate to within three feet at 1,100 yards.
Although Dar had fired the M40—the old modified Remington 700 hunting rifle—occasionally on shooting ranges in the past few years, he still had to reacquaint himself with the weapon. When he had been trained as a young Marine, it was discovered that Dar had 20/10 vision, which meant simply that what was perfectly clear for a person with 20/20 vision at one hundred yards was just as clear to Dar at two hundred yards. Even before Dar had decided for certain on becoming an outcast through advanced sniper training, he had qualified as an “expert rifleman” at Parris Island boot camp. In the time-honored tradition of the Corps, riflemen could qualify in three categories—marksman, sharpshooter, and—very, very rarely—expert rifleman. Dar had qualified as expert rifleman on Record Day with 317 points out of a possible 330, a distinction that was rare enough that his commanding officer had told him that only a dozen Marines had equaled it going back to World War II. The first 317 score had been made by a Marine who went on to be a famous writer and biographer.
The qualities that went into superb marksmanship included the control of breathing that was so important, extraordinary eyesight, patience, the ability to fire a weapon from several positions, and the ability to factor in distance, gravity, wind, and the weapon’s unique quirks with every shot. Another important—and underrated—requirement was cleverness with adjusting the rifle’s sling, a skill difficult to teach but which had come naturally to young Dar. Now, almost thirty years later, Dar knew that his eyesight had deteriorated to a mere 20/20 for distance shooting, but the comfort with the weapon, the ability to adjust the sling properly without thinking about it, the sense of proper range and ability to zero the weapon, the ability to fire easily and accurately from a prone, kneeling, sitting, and standing position—all these remained.